How Danny McLachlan and Leandra Mardynalka survived 26 hours in -43 C weather after they got lost in a blizzard

Twenty years old and dead. Frozen in a Manitoba blizzard; a god awful, wind rattling Prairie howler where you can’t see five feet in front of you and where you can’t stop thinking about being 20 and dead. It didn’t seem fair. It isn’t fair. So Danny McLachlan cried.

Climbed off his snowmobile and wept into a swirling snow, tears flooding his eyes until his 20-year-old girlfriend, Leandra Mardynalka, a woman he loved but never understood could be so strong, told him to calm down. They needed to focus. They weren’t dead yet.

“We were running out of fuel,” Mr. McLachlan says from the couples’ home in Steinbach, Man. “And I just completely broke down because it was so cold and because if that sled ran out of gas on the lake we were going to die. And you could see death, right there. It wouldn’t have taken much.

“But then Leandra said, ‘We can’t just sit here waiting to die. We need to get back on the snowmobile. We need to put the wind at our backs.’”

Danny and Leandra met through friends three years ago. He was working at an auto shop. She stopped by to see him. They have been together ever since. Going ice fishing at a shack on the Lake of the Woods is one of the things they do, and it is where they woke up the morning of Jan. 26. Torque, their toy Pomeranian, was with them. They were 20 minutes from where their truck was parked at Birch Point. It was snowing, though not heavily. Danny was wearing his cowboy boots. They didn’t have food, or water. They set off for home at 9 a.m.

“We were getting cold,” Mr. McLachlan says. “After I stopped the sled on the ice and got back on — we put the wind at our backs — we just went that way.”

They hit land. Mr. McLachlan, a smoker, had a lighter. (His cell phone was dead; Leandra’s was back at the truck; their iPad was unable to get a signal.) They lit a fire using gas from the snowmobile.

Mr. McLachlan dug through the snow to solid ground and made a snow wall to protect them from the wind. They put Torque in a pillowcase beside the fire and, as day became night, as the cold bit ever deeper, they talked, nudging one another to stay awake, gathering more wood to feed the fire every 15 minutes and saying things that couples in love too often don’t say enough.

Around 3 a.m., Leandra despaired. They were so tired.

“You are 20 years old,” Mr. McLachlan says. “And to think, if I don’t get up, me — get up — right now, and get us some more wood, we are going to die out here. It is the weirdest thing.”

Around 4 a.m. the blizzard subsided. The temperature was minus-43. Day broke. Mr. McLachlan heard an engine in the distance. He ran toward it, chasing the sound through a stand of trees.

You could see death, right there

“I just kept going and then I saw a house,” he says. “It was just like the movies. Going up the stairs, one at a time. There was this big door — it had a lever handle on it — and I dropped my hand on it and fell inside.

“The owner came running. I told him my girlfriend and dog were still in the bush and he ran outside and was gone for them.

“It was such a relief.”

They had been lost for 26 hours. They weren’t, in fact, even in Canada anymore. They were in Minnesota.

Mr. McLachlan could lose his baby toes to frostbite. Even if he doesn’t, he will be in a wheelchair for another three weeks and will have to learn to walk again. Ms. Mardynalka has frostbite on her nose and upper thighs. She has been having trouble sleeping and was uncomfortable speaking to me about their experiences, so let Mr. McLachlan do the talking. (Torque, the Pomeranian, pulled through just fine.)

“I thought Torque was dead more than once,” Mr. McLachlan says. “But I would have never guessed Leandra would have that kind of strength. She was tough as nails.”

She stayed calm. Now it is time for her boyfriend to be nervous. One of the things they discussed during the loneliest hours of the night was getting married.

“It is definitely in the cards,” Danny McLachlan says. “But I am going to need to talk to her Dad first.”

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